Finding the difference between the feeling and the fear

Fresh off the back of a well-received debut, validation had become a double-edged sword, making it impossible to separate her own creative instincts from the expectations of other people. "At times, my drive to be an artist felt like a darker, more feral part of my brain that was craving attention and love, while the enlightened part just wanted to make art," she explains. "It felt like this really tumultuous battle between these two sides. Why do I have to put myself in the position of wanting acclaim? Why can't I just make music? It's a part of myself I don't understand."

One result of Berrin’s self-interrogation was "Downhill", a fatalistic, shimmering takedown of her darkest impulses. It's the sound of someone greeting their own chaos with an eyeroll, and it ripples with existential dread. "That song definitely came from a moment of pessimism," she says. "When I wrote it my sense of self was pretty tenuous, and I was trying to figure out how to pursue my dream of being an artist while also protecting myself as a person."

Many of Mirror’s songs continue this theme of battling herself. "Street Fighter" is a fiery pop anthem in a Pat Benatar vein, with arcade synths and quickfire clapbacks, while "Spinning" confesses her fears of slipping into self-parody. "When I wrote 'Spinning', I felt I was projecting a heightened version of myself that isn't necessarily reflective of who I am," she says. "I think we can all do that sometimes, especially my people-pleasers out there. For a while that song was an amorphous cloud I couldn't break into words, a general malaise I wasn't detached enough from to understand. So writing isn't always cathartic."

For Berrin, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me signals a “hard reset” from 2021's Death of a Cheerleader, whose mix of romance and rebellion suited the nostalgic, genre-spanning sound she'd perfected – hooks worthy of resurrected ‘90s pop-rock trio that dog., dreamy ‘60s-inflected ballads, and the scratchy-throated holler of grunge. It was set in what felt like a deliriously adolescent universe, where tears spill like soda, evenings are spent sneaking out to the bleachers, mothers gossip about you behind your back, and texts are scoured like ancient manuscripts for meaning.

When Berrin started Pom Pom Squad nine years ago, the cheerleading concept felt "cheeky and ironic, because the cheerleader is such an all-American archetype – you think of the blonde, popular, pretty girl. As a young woman of colour who felt depressed and hyper-sensitive, and thought a lot about the world around me, on paper being a cheerleader just seemed easy and fun and light. There was an irony that you wouldn't look at a girl like me in fucking Doc Martens and think 'cheerleader’. But I feel like cheerleaders have been rewritten in a really fun way over the last few years as strong, daring athletes."

For Berrin, that shift meant cheerleading wasn't the right fit for where she wanted to go next, not least because she’d outgrown the teenage dichotomies of goth vs. prep, nerd vs. prom queen, inner demons vs. school spirit. She’d cut a subversive figure in her varsity sweater, or dressed in powdery white, staring out from an open grave, but something fundamental had shifted. "Mostly, I'm just not a teenager anymore,” she explains. “There's not the same contrast as when Pom Pom Squad was a DIY punk band, dressing in a cheerleader skirt when people around me were doing black and studs and classic punk shit. And the project has to grow with me because the project is me."

Berrin also made the conscious choice to avoid writing about break-ups or romance or crushes. She wanted to take a long hard look into her own psyche and figure out her relationship with herself, however splintered that might be. "With Death of a Cheerleader, I was writing about coming out as queer and falling in love with a woman for the first time. I built that world around feelings of passion, of love and joy, and being in full embrace of my queerness. It was colourful. It was inspired by drag and camp. But this time I wanted to take that character and put her in a darker place. I wasn't feeling like an empowered badass cheerleader. I was feeling very fragile and uncomfortable."

Whereas the debut offered a tongue-in-cheek look at the drama and hostility of high school, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me is more of an inner monologue about survival, with its delicate piano solos chased by thunderingly assertive choruses. "Did you see the movie 'bout the girl so obsessed over proving herself she loses herself?" she asks in the stunning finale, "The Tower".

Growing up in various places – Long Island, Detroit, Orlando – Berrin learnt all about losing and finding herself as a seasoned new girl scrutinising her classmates while trying to figure out her next move. "Being a woman of colour, growing up partially in the South, you have to be a chameleon a little bit," she says. "It does involve this kind of split-brain dissonance, of watching yourself from the outside and fixing the positioning of your body, adjusting your voice and moulding yourself to the environment."

Like so many outsiders before her, she found solace in riot grrrl, punk and grunge, which provided not only Tumblr inspiration but also a reason to abandon her perfectionism and voice some of that confusion and rage. "The thing I loved specifically about riot grrrl was that it was messy,” she says. “You didn't have to be the best guitarist or the best vocalist, you just had to have something to say. It really opened up my world because I was so angry at that age, which can feel forbidden as a young woman. You have these meta-feelings where you're mad at yourself for being depressed. You police your own feelings."

Still, being on the sidelines served to heighten Berrin’s powers of perception. "Sometimes I look at my younger self and envy what she had,” she explains. “As insecure and troubled and depressed as I was, there was also a weird wisdom. I'll go back and read my journals from when I was 17 and realise I was writing down lessons that I still find myself relearning as an adult." She graduated high school in Orlando with “a sense that life was happening somewhere else." Moving to Brooklyn, she started creating demos on GarageBand, figuring out details and seeking out collaborators as she went along.

"Working with other people made me realise how important production is, and how the producer holds all the cards," she says. "I felt pushed around in the beginning because I lacked technical knowledge. Some of it is relatively intuitive, but there's a level of jargon that functions as a barrier to entry that could actually be very easily explained by someone who is patient and kind about it.” She cites one example of a song she’d been unhappy with and wanted to change but was told by the producers that she was “just freaking out.” “They thought I was being hysterical. And I remember as that door was closing, hearing them laughing at me, I decided I would learn how to produce because I never wanted to let anyone make me feel that way ever again."

Berrin was as good as her word, co-producing Death of a Cheerleader with Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin and Mirror Starts Moving Without Me with Cody Fitzgerald of Stolen Jars. Somewhere down the line, her uncertainty receded and she became unfazed by the one-upmanship of certain male peers, recognising that, as a woman, there'll always be someone ready to talk down to you and assume you know nothing, or that your hands are too small to play guitar.

"It's funny because I'm a professional musician, but there are certain things I don't know and people will use that against me," she says, laughing. "I had someone try to explain to me how a Telecaster sounds recently, and I'm like, ‘I literally did a campaign for Fender.’" She harbours a dream to open a guitar store "where everything is girly pop," where people won't "get in a wheeze" over guitar brands but focus on the simple thrill of playing songs.

That simple thrill is one she herself nearly lost sight of. Berrin started Mirror Starts Moving Without Me with a bad case of writer's block, but rather than admit defeat she took time to remember why she loved music in the first place. Digging out old favourites like Rufus Wainwright, Regina Spektor, Hole, Bikini Kill and FKA twigs did the trick, returning her to a more innocent, uncynical state of mind. So did reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, as well as whiling away hours playing the videogames of her childhood – something she pays tribute to in the final seconds of the video for “Spinning”.

"There's a lot of pretence around music. I felt bogged down by expectation, and so scared of other people being disappointed in me that I was writing stuff I didn't like. I had to ask myself what songs, detached from anything other than my own taste, did I really love?" she explains. "I loved that exercise so much I asked everyone in the band to do it, then ended up going a little crazy and making a Venn diagram of all the songs and artists we had in common. It showed me I have the right group of people around me, because we share the same musical values."

Berrin says she tends to be “a warm and cuddly producer,” generous with pep talks and rounds of applause when someone nails a solo. “I want people to feel good and comfortable, because that's when you do your best work," she says. "I know a lot of people disagree and think everyone has to be on edge to do something cool, but that's just not how I work."

Returning to her earlier observation that songwriting isn’t always cathartic, I ask her if completing work on Mirror had exorcised any of the pain she’d felt at the start. "I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I can't listen to it yet," she admits. "It feels too close to home, and some of it's embarrassing and really vulnerable in a different way. I don't know, it's just harder…” She breaks off. “Oh my god, why do I want to cry...?! I think this project was harder in so many ways. I'm still learning how to talk about it.”

Still, Berrin recognises that even if a song isn’t necessarily cathartic for her, it can be cathartic for others. “It's amazing to help someone understand their feelings better. Music did that for me so many times,” she explains. “I don't think art would exist if we could beam our thoughts and feelings straight into another person's head, you know? I think it exists because we're all just trying to come up with abstract metaphors to make others understand how we feel. When I started this album I was scared to experiment, but, at the end of the day, that doesn't make for authentic art."

It was only by allowing herself to voice all those fractured selves that Berrin could even begin to make sense of them. Mirror Starts Moving Without Me has its share of epiphanies, but it doesn't pretend to have everything figured out. Identity is still one long, confusing hall of mirrors, and that's equally true if you're wriggling into a cheerleader costume or hiding from the world in your ugliest pyjamas.

"It's important to understand that in every single exchange, with every person in this life, you're only getting a version," she continues. "You're never seeing them fully, regardless of if they tell you their life story the first time you meet, or if you hear a song they wrote, or if you hang out with them a long time. Everyone can craft a persona. That's how I built my confidence as a young person, crafting a version of myself online that felt like the best version.

"But sometimes when I show people my music, it doesn't always feel like the best version of me," she concludes. "I'm not always the hero of my own story."